1. In
the early
1920s, Heidegger will repeatedly proclaim that genuine philosophy
“is and remains atheism” (HCT 80/GA20 109-10), because true
philosophical questioning must follow where the questions themselves
lead and so cannot agree ahead of time to abide by the external limits
imposed by the Church or any other would-be authorities over matters of
the mind or spirit. For precisely the same reason, of course, a
“Nazi Philosopher” would also be an oxymoron, a fact
Heidegger unfortunately failed to grasp between 1933 and
1937.

2. As
Bernasconi
(1998, p. 378) rightly observes, “there has been relatively
little scrutiny of Heidegger's attempt to free the concept of art
itself from its status as an aesthetic category.” For nice
explications of the broader historical context of Heidegger's
hermeneutic and phenomenological understanding of art, see Guignon 2003
and Crowell 2010.

3. David
Whewell (in
Cooper 1995, p. 6) defines “aestheticism” as:
“The doctrine that art should be valued for itself alone and not
for any purpose or function it may happen to serve,” which
connects this idea to the l'art pour l'art
movement that emerged in mid-nineteenth century France.

4. Julian Young's excellent
translation of “The Origin of the Work of Art” (see OBT)
has frequently been consulted, and the emendations he makes to the
better known translation of the essay by Hofstadter (in PLT) have
often been adopted here.

5. For
Heidegger,
the historical transformation of intelligibility (or “history of
being”) proceeds—via what we would now call a
“punctuated equilibrium”—through five different
Western “epochs” or historical constellations of
intelligibility: the Presocratic, Platonic, Medieval, Modern, and
late-Modern epochs. For a full discussion of Heidegger's
understanding of the mechanisms responsible for establishing,
maintaining, and transforming our fundamental sense of what is and what
matters, see Thomson 2005, Ch. 1.

6. Heidegger's
view of art applies to all great art, including, e.g., great
poetic works of art. Thus he writes that in a masterful
Greek tragedy like Aeschylus's Oresteia, “the
struggle of the new gods against the old is being fought. The
work of language…does not speak about this struggle; rather, it
transforms the saying of the people so that every essential word fights
the battle and puts up for decision what is holy and unholy, what great
and what small, what brave and what cowardly, what precious and what
fleeting, what master and what slave (cf. Heraclitus, Fragment
53)” (PLT 43/GA5 29). There would, moreover, be much to say
about the complex political subtext of the seemingly self-referential
passages quoted here, with their abundant use of such Nazi buzzwords
as Kampf (struggle), derivatives of führen
(leading), and the opposition of Sieg (victory) and
Schmach (disgrace). Typically, Heidegger's
rhetorical strategy is to try to appropriate these buzzwords by
radically reinterpreting them in terms of his own philosophy.

7. Dreyfus
draws on
Clifford Geertz (along with Thomas Kuhn and Charles Taylor) to help
illuminate Heidegger. As Dreyfus (2005, p. 412) explains:
“The temple draws the people who act in its light to clarify,
unify, and extend the reach of its style, but being a material thing it
resists rationalization. And since no interpretation can ever
completely capture what the work means, the temple sets up a struggle
between earth and world. The result is fruitful in that the
conflict of interpretations that ensues generates a culture's
history.”

8. This
view was
first sketched in Thomson 1998. Heidegger raises an important
puzzle for this view, however, when he implicitly but deliberately
includes Van Gogh's painting as a “great” work of art
in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” stating that
“great art…is all we are talking about here” (PLT
40/GA5 26). The solution to this puzzle is that the way Van
Gogh's painting illuminates what art itself is, as we will see,
is supposed to help us transcend modern aesthetics from within, and
this encounter itself is supposed to exemplify—and so help us
learn to understand—what it means to encounter being in a
“post modern” way. For Heidegger, i.e., Van
Gogh's painting is both a paradigmatic and a macroparadigmatic
work; for, it shows us what art is in a way that changes our
understanding of what it means for anything to be. (This
post-modern understanding of being applies universally but it is not
totalizing, moreover, because of the way it helps us understand and so
encounter all that is as conceptually inexhaustible, as we will see in
section 3.7 below.)

9. In
his important
book, Young rightly recognizes “the inseparability of ontology
and ethics” as “a thesis fundamental to all phases of
Heidegger's thinking” (Young 2001, p. 24).

10. Even
if this
rather esoteric view represents the romantic kernel in Kant's
aesthetic thought, it nevertheless presupposes the same subject/object
divide that, as we will see, Heidegger believes has led the entire
aesthetic tradition off track.

11. Cf.
T.S.
Eliot's well-crafted line (from “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock”): “And I have known the eyes already, known
them all— / The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, / And
when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, / When I am pinned and
wriggling on the wall, / Then how should I
begin…”

12. In
the
scholarly literature, the answer to this question is often drawn from
Heidegger's “Six Basic Developments in the History of
Aesthetics” (section 13 from the first of Heidegger's
famous Nietzsche lectures, The Will to Power as Art,
delivered between 1936 and 1937). The history of aesthetics
Heidegger presents here is typically taken as Heidegger's own
view, despite the fact that this raises puzzles about why Heidegger
seems to have drastically different views in essays written at almost
the same time. It is not always easy to separate
Heidegger's own view from the Nietzschean position he claims to
be explicating (especially in the first of his Nietzsche
lectures—this becomes much less of a problem by the end of the
second lecture series, as Heidegger becomes increasingly disillusioned
with Nazism and so more careful to distinguish Nietzsche's views
from his own). Nevertheless, Heidegger clearly claims that the
history of aesthetics he presents here is in fact drawn fromNietzsche, and should be understood as “an attempt to
simplify Nietzsche's presentations concerning art to what is
essential” (N1 122/GA43 143). Recognizing this makes it
less surprising that Heidegger occasionally contradicts these views
when speaking in his own voice elsewhere (as in the lecture delivered
the following year, “The Age of the World Picture, explicated
below).

13. Heidegger
suggests in 1937 that modern aesthetics stays within the traditional
philosophical approach to art. “The name
‘aesthetics’ for a meditation on art and the beautiful is
young and stems from the eighteenth century. But the matter
itself so aptly named by this name—that is, the way of inquiring
into art and the beautiful on the basis of the state of feeling in
enjoyers and producers—is old, just as old as mediation on art
and the beautiful in Western thought. The philosophical
meditation on the essence of art and the beautiful already begins as
aesthetics.” (N1 79/GA43 92) Heidegger's more
careful view is that aesthetics proper presupposes the modern
subject/object divide, but because he holds Plato responsible for
inaugurating this divide, he can loosely trace the
“aesthetic” way of conceiving art all the way back to
Aristotle, as he does here.

15. Heidegger
presupposes the same point again in What Is Called Thinking
(1951-52). Here he glosses “seeing art aesthetically”
by adding: “that is, from the point of view of expression
and impression—the work as expression and the impression as
experience” (WCT 128/GA8 132).

16. On
Heidegger
and Duchamp, see Vattimo 2008, pp. xvi, 45-7, 105, and 159.
Vattimo even suggests that Duchamp's “Fountain”
is a better illustration of art's revolutionary potential than
Heidegger's own example of the Greek temple. Yet, there are
for Heidegger clearly different orders of magnitude here. In this
regard, Wright nicely captures Heidegger's larger point when she
writes that: “The temple celebrates the extraordinary event
of Greece's emergence as a history-making force that gives
direction to the next two thousand years of Western
history” (Wright 1998, p. 385). Or, as Dreyfus 2005
(p. 419 note 4) puts it: “The [Greek] temple and the
Presocratic thinkers had to take the style that was already in the
language and, for the first time, focus it and hold it up to the
people. According to Heidegger, this is the origin
(Ur-sprung) of our Western culture.”

17. In
his
treatment of Shapiro's critique of Heidegger, Michael Kelly
raises the same objection to Heidegger's interpretation of Van
Gogh, suggesting that Heidegger sets himself a difficult challenge in
his “attempt to desubjectivize aesthetics while discussing Van
Gogh,” an artist who placed his work under the bold signature,
“Vincent,” and is often taken as “the paradigm case
of subjective art.” Kelly's interpretation of
“the subjectivization of aesthetics” as the tendency
“to understand and judge art in terms of the viewer's
subjective experience or judgment of it” allows him to bring
Heidegger into dialogue with central issues in contemporary aesthetics
(Kelly 2003, pp. 49-50), but this interpretation overlooks what
Heidegger most fundamentally objects to about aesthetics, viz., its
relation to “subjectivism.” Heidegger's deepest
objection to aesthetics is not that our understanding of art is overly
constrained by idiosyncratic, “subjective” biases but, as
we have seen, that aesthetics follows from (and feeds back into) the
modern subject's “subjectivistic” compulsion to
control the entire objective world—a compulsion that Heidegger
argues derives from modern metaphysics and thus from the “history
of being,” and so requires a response at this deeper level.

18. As
Heidegger
begins to extend his critique of aesthetic subjectivism so as to
connect it to “enframing” (i.e., our reductive way of
understanding the being of entities in terms of Nietzsche's
ontotheology of eternally recurring will-to-power), he will go so far
as to claim that: “The aesthetic state is the lucidity
through which we constantly see.” (N1 139/GA43 170)

19. Schiller's
famous poem, “The Gods of
Greece,” mournfully contrasts the experience of the ancient
Greeks, in which “Everything to the initiate's eye / Showed
the trace of a God,” with our modern experience of “A
Nature shorn of the divine [or, less poetically, “a de-divinized
nature,” die entgötterte Natur]” (quoted by
Taylor 2007, pp. 316-7). Heidegger himself will pit (what we
could think of as) the texture of the text against this modern
current in order to resist its more nihilistic effects and try
to lead it beyond itself (as we will see in parts 4 and 5 below).

20. In
his
broader “history of being,” Heidegger traces
“subjectivism” back to Plato, whose doctrine of the ideas
begins a movement whereby truth is no longer understood solely in terms
of the manifestation of entities themselves but, instead, becomes a
feature of our own “representational” capacities. In
this way, truth becomes a matter of the way we secure our knowledge of
entities rather than of the prior way entities disclose themselves to
us. (On this “displacement of the locus of truth”
from being to human subjectivity, see Thomson 2005, p. 160.)

21. The
modern
prejudice that (to put it simply) all meaning comes from the human
subject reaches its most powerful apotheosis in Nietzsche and
Freud. From Heidegger's perspective, however, this
phenomenologically mistaken view misses (and subsequently obscures) the
fact that meaning emerges at the prior practical intersection of human
beings with their worlds (as well as in our engaged negotiations with
one another). Heidegger is thus an ethical realist, one whose
phenomenological investigations led him to recognize that the world is
no mute partner but, rather, actively contributes to our most profound
sense of what matters (see below and Thomson 2004).

22. In
“The
Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger again presents his
phenomenological conception of “existence” as a way to
undercut and transcend the modern subject/object dichotomy:
“In existence, however, humanity does not first move out of
something ‘interior’ to something ‘exterior’;
rather, the essence of existence is the out-standing standing within
the essential separation [i.e., the ontological difference between
being and entities thought in terms of the essential strife that joins
“earth and world”] belonging to the clearing of
beings.” (PLT 67/GA5 55)

23. As
this
suggests, Heidegger's later work is dedicated to detecting,
resisting, and, ultimately, transcending what he took to be the core of
the Nazi ideology. For a justification of this admittedly
provocative claim, see Thomson 2009.

24. Dreyfus
(2005, p. 413) calls the freeway interchange a “debased work of
art” because he thinks it “imposes such an efficient order
on nature that earth is no longer able to resist.” Thomson
(2005, pp. 70-1) suggests that this is a bit too bleak to be the view
of Heidegger, who instead followed the Hölderlinian dictum:
“Where the danger is, however, there grows / that which saves as
well [Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende
auch].” See also Brodsley 1981 and Dreyfus
2009.

25. On
Heidegger's prediction, see Thomson 2009. For a
neo-Heideggerian critique of our ongoing attempts to optimize ourselves
technologically, see Sandel 2007.

26. In
the early
1950s, e.g., Heidegger again asks, “while science records the
brain currents, what becomes of the tree in bloom? …[W]e
shall forfeit everything before we know it, once the sciences of
physics, physiology, and psychology, not to forget scientific
philosophy, display the panoply of their documents and proofs, to
explain to us that what we see and accept is properly not a tree but in
reality a void, thinly sprinkled with electric charges here and there
that race hither and yon at enormous speeds” (WCT 42-3/GA8
45-6).

27. Concerning
“great art,” Heidegger acknowledges that many of the
“works themselves [still] stand and hang in museums and
exhibitions,” but and asks: “[A]re they here in
themselves as the works they themselves are, or are they not rather
here as objects of the art industry?” Heidegger's
point is that “placing artworks in a collection has withdrawn
them from their own world” (PLT 40/GA5 26); i.e., the
“great works of art” have been uprooted from the worlds of
meaning they once focused and preserved in a way that kept the future
of those worlds open. Although it might initially sound
counter-intuitive, then, Heidegger is suggesting that most of the great
works we find collected in museums no longer keep their worlds open,
and thus no longer work as art. As he puts it:
“As soon as the thrust into the extraordinary is parried and
captured by the sphere of familiarity and connoisseurship,” the
work of art has ended and “the art business has begun” (PLT
68/GA5 56). In Heidegger's rather polemical view:
“The whole art industry, even if carried to the extreme and
exercised in every way for the sake of the works themselves, extends
only to the object-being of the works. But this object-being [of
artworks] does not constitute their work-being” (PLT 41/GA5
27). This reduction of art-works to art
“objects” is, as we have seen, at the core of the
aestheticization of art Heidegger opposes. An objection
often raised in the literature—viz., that Heidegger's own
work on Van Gogh, e.g., cannot hope to escape making a contribution to
aesthetics and the art industry—misses the fact that Heidegger
seeks to transcend aesthetics from within (as we will see) by trying to
preserve what he argues phenomenologically is the true significance of
Van Gogh's painting. Here as elsewhere, then, Heidegger
employs the rhetorical strategy Derrida refers to as a “phoenix
motif”: “One burns or buries what is already
dead [or dying] so that life…will be reborn and regenerated
from these ashes.” (See Derrida 1985, p. 26, discussed in
Thomson 2005, p. 154.)

28. Heidegger
understands the manifestation of a new truth of being in art as
“beauty” (PLT 81/GA5 69), but beauty understood in
a post-aesthetic sense as the revelation of a new understanding of
being. As he puts it in the early 1950s: “Beauty is a
fateful gift of the essence of truth, whereby truth means the
unconcealment of the self-concealing. The beautiful is not what
pleases, but what falls within that fateful gift of truth which comes
into its own when that which is eternally unapparent [or inconspicuous,
Unscheinbare] and therefore invisible attains its most
radiantly apparent appearance.” (WCT 19/GA8 21) On
the distinctive sense of “postmodern” that can rightly be
applied to Heidegger, see Thomson 2006.

29. As
Hammermeister (2002, p. 175) shows convincingly, however,
“Heidegger's claim for a fresh start glosses over his
affinities for the idealist tradition, especially
Schelling.”

30. Heidegger's
famous essay was first
published in 1950, along with its undated “Afterword”
(which, judging from its terminology, stems from about 1938), as the
first chapter of Holzwege; the 1956 “Addendum” was
first added to the 1960 Reclam edition. For interpretations of
the changes which take place between the earliest drafts of
Heidegger's famous art essay, see Taminiaux 1993 and Bernasconi
1999. Clearly, a significant transformation occurs between the
earliest, German nationalistic version of Heidegger's essay and
the much more famous, published version, in which traces of that
earlier nationalism still survive (in the largely undeveloped
references to Greek tragedy and to Hölderlin, e.g.) but can no
longer be said to dominate the piece (pace Wright 1998).
For an interpretation of the ways in which Heidegger further modified
his view after the 1930s, see Young 2001.

31. Young
is
right that Heidegger's interpretation of Van Gogh is
“anomalous” if we understand anomaly in a Kuhnian way, as
an inexplicable detail that, when properly understood, transforms our
entire previous view.

32. As
Plato puts
it: “everything that is responsible for creating something
out of nothing is a kind of poetry; and so all the creations of every
craft and profession are themselves a kind of poetry, and everyone who
practices a craft is a poet” (Symposium, 205b, Woodruff
and Nehamas translation).

33. There
are,
nonetheless, other possibilities. It could be that “The
Origin of the Work of Art” (as it is often read) merely prepares
for this crucial encounter with an artwork capable of ushering in a new
understanding of being, an encounter which perhaps never
arrives (such that Heidegger himself dies waiting for the arrival of a
salvific event that never comes, as Wolin (1990) and others suggest by
emphasizing Heidegger's famous Der Spiegel interview,
“Only a God Can Save Us”). Or it could be that
Heidegger is here simply setting-up his reading of the German Romantic
poet Friedrich Hölderlin, whose work Heidegger does most
frequently nominate to play such a pivotal role (including in his
1934-35 lectures, see GA39). The latter hypothesis receives some
apparent support from the fact that “The Origin of the Work of
Art” closes by quoting two lines from Hölderlin's
poem, “The Journey”: “What dwells near the
origin / Leaves that place with reluctance” (PLT 78/GA5
66). Wright (1998) makes the strongest case for reading these
lines as a nationalistic call for Germany to break with the history of
the West that began in Greece and begin history again, but
Wright's genealogical analysis of Heidegger's essay, while
insightful and revealing, misses the emergent view that took shape only
in the final version of the essay, where Van Gogh rather than
Hölderlin plays the starring role. (By the time Heidegger
wrote the final draft of “The Origin of the Work of Art,
moreover, he is no longer assigning a vanguard role to
“Germany” in the dissemination of this postmodern view, as
he did in its first draft, following GA39. By
“Germany,” moreover, Heidegger always primarily meant
himself, a thinker creatively interpreting
Hölderlin's meaning for German history in terms of his
own philosophical views—and Heidegger's idea that his
thought was crucial for a postmodern revolution is something he never
stopped believing.) Heidegger does conclude his famous essay by
proposing Hölderlin's lines as “a test” that is
supposed “infallibly” to tell us whether, “in our
comportment to art,” our existence stands within art's
“origin” or whether we are merely relying on a cultured
acquaintance with the past. Hölderlin's suggestive
lines are polysemic (and their full significance for Heidegger could be
explicated at length, bringing is such facts as Heidegger's
recent and very public refusal to leave his home near the Black Forest
in order to accept a prestigious chair of philosophy in Berlin, as well
as the allusion to the Greek adage, “All beginnings are
difficult,” which Wright nicely picks up on). Read in the
context of the published essay, however, Heidegger uses these lines
primarily to suggest that we can tell that we are genuinely
encountering art when we find it as difficult to put its meaning into
words as the artist found it to capture that meaning in the work in the
first place. As we will see, “The Origin of the
Work” seeks to lead its audience performatively to encounter this
“enigma of art” (PLT 79/GA5 67) for ourselves in order to
learn to understand being in a post-modern way. Indeed, this
performative dimension is a central and defining feature of all
Heidegger's most important later works, each of which (despite
many important connections to Heidegger's other works) seeks to
be self-contained in this respect, i.e., each of these essays seeks to
lead its audience to see something important (even existentially
transformative) for themselves. Heidegger's famous essay
does not indefinitely postpone such an encounter or even merely prepare
for it to happen at some point in the future or in another of his
works; he thinks he has prepared for it to happen in (or through)
“The Origin of the Work of Art” itself. As he thus
puts it there: “Our efforts concerning the actual working
of the work [die Wirklichkeit des Werkes] should have prepared
the ground for discovering, in this working of the work, art and its
essential nature” (PLT 70/GA5 58). As strange as it sounds
initially, this means that it is primarily Van Gogh rather than
Hölderlin whom Heidegger turns to in order to teach us how to
encounter the work of art in a postmodern way in his most famous essay
on art.

34. After
this chapter was written, another scholar was discovered who notices this
intriguing puzzle and interprets it similarly (see Gover 2008). Gover, however, goes so far as
to present the poem itself as the central work in Heidegger's
famous essay. Gover is right that Meyer's poem is
much more important to Heidegger's essay than previous
interpreters have realized, but once one
recognizes that Heidegger's goal is to transcend modern
aesthetics from within, then the painting clearly emerges as the most
crucial work of art in his essay. A further bit of evidence for
this view can be found in the fact that Heidegger's three
examples—the Greek temple, the “Roman Fountain” poem,
and Van Gogh's painting—map onto the three main ages in his
history of being, viz., the ancient, medieval, and modern,
respectively. The poem nicely illustrates that history for
Heidegger (we shall see), but his attempt to transcend modernity from
within takes place primarily through his interpretation of the modern
work: Van Gogh's painting of “A Pair of
Shoes.”

35. Concerning
the “truth set into the work” of the poem, Heidegger asks
(rhetorically—he often uses rhetorical questions to make bold
assertions): “Which truth happens in the work? Can
truth happen at all and thus be historical?” (PLT 38/GA5
23) Because Meyer surely did not intend his poem to mean what
Heidegger takes it to mean (viz., that truth is essentially historical
and this history is epochal), it is only natural to worry here about
the thorny issue of the significance authors' intentions have for
the meaning of their work. For Heidegger, works of art have two
equally important sides: their creation (by an artist)
and their preservation (by a community of interpreters). As he
puts it: “Just as a work cannot be without being created
and thus is essentially in need of creators, so what is created cannot
itself come into being without those who preserve it.” (PLT
66/GA5 54) An artwork without an interpretive community remains
mute, and Heidegger suggests that artworks' creators are often
unreliable guides to the meaning of their own work. Notoriously,
Heidegger was never shy about asserting that he understood a work
better than its own author, whether that author was a philosopher
(whose essential but “unthought” thoughts Heidegger sought
to explicate) or an artist (with an insufficient philosophical
understanding of his work). E.g., Petzet tells us that, although
Paul Klee's work was “of crucial significance for
Heidegger,” Heidegger was convinced that Klee himself “does
not know what is happening” in his own work (Petzet 1993, pp.
147, 149). As if to justify this view, Heidegger quotes from
Klee's Creative Confessions, where Klee writes:
“Art plays an unknowing game with the ultimate things and yet
reaches them nonetheless!” (Seubold 1993, p. 9)
Heidegger will thus seek to deepen Klee's self-understanding by
questioning Klee's own presuppositions. E.g., Heidegger
takes the first sentence of Klee's Creative
Confessions—viz., “Art does not give the visible but,
instead, makes visible”—and asks: “What?
The invisible and from where and in what way the invisible
determines?” (Seubold 1993, p. 12) Perhaps the most
sympathetic way to understand Heidegger's undeniable hermeneutic
arrogance is that, as a phenomenologist, he is committed to the view
that our knowledge of authors' intentions can easily narrow and
so distort our appreciation of the essentially polysemic meaning of
their work (assuming it is indeed “great” work). This
would, at any rate, help explain Heidegger's belief that the
truth of the work shows itself to us most “purely,
…[p]recisely where the artist and the process and the
circumstances surrounding the genesis of the work remain unknown”
(PLT 65/GA5 53).

36. As
we saw in
part one, it was not until 1938 (in The Age of the World
Picture”) that Heidegger began to distinguish modern
“subjectivism” (the modern subject's quest to
completely control the objective world) from “enframing”
(the objectification of that subject whereby everything gets reduced to
the status of an intrinsically-meaningless “resource,”
Bestand, merely standing by to be optimized and efficiently
ordered for further use). Heidegger also later distinguishes
between two phases in the Ancient world, viz., the Presocratic and the
Platonic (see Thomson 2005, Ch. 1).

37. In
this
regard, it is quite possible that Heidegger does not envision a new
fountain, or even a fourth basin, here in 1936 but instead imagines a
(much more politically problematic) revitalization of the third basin,
along the lines of his then current faith in the possibility of
redirecting the Third Reich philosophically. Given the timing of
Heidegger's essay, the suggestive proximity of the words
“reich / Der dritten” (“…riches / the
third…”) in lines 5 and 6 of Meyer's poem are
certainly troubling in this regard (PLT 37/GA5 23). This worry
cannot be dismissed by pointing to the obvious fact that Meyer employs
the reich of “riches” rather than the homophonic
Reich of “empire,” because Heidegger's own
understanding of poetry stresses the central importance of
poetry's ineliminable polysemy. Indeed, it is precisely
here that those searching for a hidden allusion to Nazism in
Heidegger's essay should look (rather than to Heidegger's
interpretation of Van Gogh's painting, as Shapiro
suggests—see section 4 below). That Heidegger chose a poem
containing these words at this time is surely no coincidence but,
rather, another significant aspect of the otherwise mysterious
attraction Meyer's rather mediocre poem held for him. Yet,
this initially alarming allusion, taken in context, actually suggests
Heidegger's view of the spiritual poverty of the Third Reich as
it existed in 1935-6, a poverty which for a brief time Heidegger hoped to
remedy by helping to lead the Nazi movement philosophically to a
“second, deeper awakening” (HB 571), a more profound
spiritual “awakening” which Heidegger rather
megalomaniacally thought Nazism could attain by being grounded not in
Hitler's eugenic vision (which Heidegger rejects as a
“biologistic” extension of Nietzschean metaphysics) but,
instead, in his own philosophical understanding of the history of
being. In general, the political context of Heidegger's
essay is too complicated and momentous an issue to address adequately
here. For a careful treatment of the broader political issues
raised by Heidegger's thinking of art, see Young 2001 as well as
the suggestive view outlined by Wright 1998. Contrast the
polemical view advanced by Geulen 2006, Ch. 6. On the more direct
connection between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics, see
Thomson 2005, Ch. 3. For more on the “other
beginning” Heidegger was then calling for, see his CP/GA65 and
Thomson 2003. To this literature, we might simply add that
Heidegger's simultaneous celebration of Van Gogh (an artist
Hitler hated and who became for the Nazis a prime example of
“degenerate art”) and of a female farmer (the very
image of a woman laborer became an anti-fascist trope) suggests how far
Heidegger was from the central tenets of Nazi ideology. (Thanks
to David Craven for suggesting these latter two points.)

38. Understanding
Heidegger's phenomenological interpretation of Van Gogh allows us
to recognize that the less culturally-monolithic understanding of art
which Dreyfus and Young rightly discern in Heidegger's later
writings can already be found in a nascent form in his phenomenological
interpretation of Van Gogh, alongside the more culturally-unified view
suggested by Heidegger's thoughts on the ancient Greek
temple. The trick is that the post-modern understanding of being
Heidegger believes Van Gogh can help us inaugurate historically would
understand the being of beings in terms of being as such, i.e., not in
a single, monolithic way but, instead, as essentially inexhaustible and
thus necessarily polysemic (as we will see in section 3.7).

39. In
this
quotation from his middle period, Heidegger calls for an
“overcoming” (Überwindung) of modern
aesthetics, but he will soon reject the idea of overcoming modern
metaphysics directly (for the aforementioned reason that any such
attempt to move directly “anti-” inevitably remains
entangled in that which it opposes), instead calling for a
“twisting-free” (Verwindung) of modern
metaphysics, i.e., a kind of passing through and getting beyond, as one
might “get over” or recover from a serious illness (see
EP).

40. According
to
the theoretical picture at the core of modern philosophy, we have no
unmediated acquaintance with reality; instead, we only ever experience
the objective world as it is re-presented in our own
consciousness. From the perspective of phenomenology, however,
this doubling of the world in representation looks like a
mischaracterization of ordinary existence, in which we usually
encounter people and trees, e.g., not representations of people and
trees. Of course, we do explicitly encounter representations in
certain types of break-down cases, for example, when our only access to
a painting is through various representations of it and, as we study
them, we become aware of subtle differences between these different
representations of the same work; or when we our only way to see our
family is by a bad telephone connection or low-resolution
videoconference in which the sound or picture make it difficult to
ignore the medium of our interaction. In such break-down cases,
we become aware of representations coming between us and the world
precisely because we experience them as a poor substitute for the thing
they represent. Interestingly, thinking about such media of
perception (especially the empirical study of optics) originally helped
Descartes motivate the rather strange idea that representations of
which we are unaware pervasively mediate our experience of the
world. On Heidegger's radical challenge to this view, see
Guignon 1993; Richardson 1986; Olafson 1987); and Dreyfus 1991.
Heidegger's theory of the transformation from the
“hands-on” (zuhanden) the “on-hand”
(vorhanden), discussed in part one above, helps explain why it
is that when our practical engagement with the world of our
involvements breaks down or runs into unexpected difficulties, we often
find ourselves explicitly deliberating, making plans, articulating our
beliefs and desires, trying out various interpretations, and the
like.

41. Hammermeister,
e.g., advances this claim (see
Hammermeister 2002, p. 238 note 8); on this point, however, Bartky
(1981) seems closer to the truth. This specific question of
whether Heidegger believes art has an essence (he does) leads back to
the larger question of whether, given Heidegger's understanding
of this essence (as a poetic naming-into-being), he can properly be
said to have a “philosophy of art,” properly
speaking. Pöggeler (1972) famously argues that Heidegger
does not have a “philosophy of art” at all, because
Heidegger does not think art distinctively as art but only in
terms of the role that art plays disclosing being in time. But
Pöggeler's criticism seems to beg the question against
Heidegger's ontological understanding of art, as von Herrmann
(1980) suggests. (Von Herrmann, like Young, finds
Heidegger's distinctive philosophy of art only in his later work,
but we will see that it can already be found in his phenomenological
reading of Van Gogh.) On this disagreement between Pöggeler
and von Herrmann, see also Seubold 1996, pp. 41-7.

42. Plato's
metaphysical understanding of the forms already lays the ground for
Kripke's influential definition of an essence as an invariant
property that can be “rigidly designated” across all
possible worlds. For more on Heidegger's historical
understanding of essences (which is closer to Hegel than to Plato, but
lacks Hegel's teleological commitments), see Thomson 2005, pp.
52-61. Owing to the nature of his project, Heidegger is much less
concerned to get all the details correct in an historical genealogy of
art than he is to show how modern aesthetics eclipses the true work of
art so that, on the basis of this critique of aesthetics, he can try to
describe and so suggest how the work of art might be encountered in a
post-aesthetic way.

43. The
essence
of art, as we will see, is the essential tension whereby being becomes
intelligible in time, so Pöggeler is right that recognizing
this essence does not allow us to distinguish art from non-art.
This essential tension conditions the becoming-intelligible of all
things, Heidegger suggests, even technological works of art that efface
and deny this struggle like the freeway interchange noted
earlier. For this reason, such works can be subjected to immanent
critiques which show that they deny, efface, or contradict their own
condition of possibility.

44. Heidegger's
more specific point here is
that the way things show themselves to us is not determined solely by
us: Human beings do not simply get to decide the fundamental
conceptual parameters through which we make sense of reality and
ourselves. Instead, the great poets and thinkers receptively
shape the lenses through which we see the world and ourselves by
selectively appropriating from among the ways things show
themselves. Even for the great poets and thinkers, then, the way
that entities reveal their being is never entirely within human control
or simply a product our own representational capacities.

45. Heidegger
describes the paradoxical movement at rest in a great work of art as
“the constantly self-exceeding composure of the work's
movement” (PLT 50/GA5 36). This fundamental ontological
instability which can be discovered in the inconspicuous movement of a
great artwork is precisely what “The Origin of the Work of
Art” describes as the “essential strife” between
“earth” and “world.” For Heidegger, the
preservation of this inconspicuous movement at rest in a
work—e.g., in the paintings of Van Gogh, Cézanne, and
Klee—is a sign of the highest artistic mastery, for it allows
such works to convey rather than conceal the conditions of their own
generation.

46. Hammermeister
(2002, p. 183) picks up on Heidegger's paradoxical description of
the movement resting in a great artwork and suggests that:
“Only because the work of art moves can it move us. Yet
there is nothing restless about the work of art either.
…[The artwork] must be thought of as simultaneously moving and
at rest.” Mining a parallel vein, Harries (1998, p. 376)
suggests that: “To be open to the earth is inevitably to be
affected, moved, claimed. Heidegger's talk of the earth
thus gestures also toward the affective base without which all our talk
of values or divinities is ultimately groundless… The step
beyond nihilism is possible only as a recovery of the
earth.”

47. Heidegger
continues: “This letting the work be a work is what we call
preservation [Bewahrung, i.e., the preservation of the
ontological truth or phenomenologically dynamic happening] of
the work.” (PLT 66/GA5 54)

48. Heidegger
discusses the Ancient hypokeimenon and
symbebêkos—which get reduced to the Medieval
“substance and accidents” and the Modern “primary and
secondary properties”—as well as Aristotle's
“formed matter” and Kant's “unity of a sensory
manifold” (see PLT 20-30/GA5 5-16).

49. Thus,
e.g.,
the last line of this quotation points to the way aesthetics serves
enframing (as we saw in section 3.3). We have good reason to be
skeptical of this description because, as Taylor Carman nicely puts it,
“just as a useful thing is not a mere object with functional
properties added on, neither is a work of art simply a useful thing
with aesthetic qualities in addition.” See Carman,
“Heidegger, Martin: Survey of Thought,” in Kelly,
ed., Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), vol. 2., p. 373.

50. From
Heidegger's perspective, the last explanation is the most
problematic; it not only illustrates the ways in which aesthetics come
to serve the “enframing” of all that is through
neuroscience but also shows how the enigma of art gets
“explained” away in the process. See
Livingstone's remarks at
http://neuro.med.harvard.edu/faculty/livingstone.html .

51. Heidegger
assumes his original audience (viz., “the Art-Historical Society
of Freiburg”) will recognize that his argument for art in
“The Origin of the Work of Art” comes out of his
complementary critique of aesthetics, because as Kelly (2003, p. 35)
notes, “the title of the colloquium at which he first presented
an early version of the “Origin” essay (and which he
coorganized) was entitled ‘The Overcoming of Aesthetics in the
Question of Art.’”

53. This
famously
chagrined Carnap, for whom such a seeming hypostatization of negation
was the very epitome of metaphysical nonsense. Indeed, Friedman
(2000) argues that this sentence effectively represents the moment
which split the so-called analytic and continental traditions
asunder. Because “The Origin of the Work of Art”
rethinks and develops this phenomenon of the “nothing” in
terms of the “earth,” this essay helps us better understand
what Heidegger was groping toward with that initially obscure
formulation from 1929.

54. “From
Van Gogh's painting we cannot even determine where these shoes
stand” (PLT 33/GA5 18)—or “to whom they belong”
(GA5 18 note a), Heidegger adds in a note he made in the margins of a
copy of the 1960 Reclam edition, clearly in response to Meyer
Shapiro's criticism. On this basis, Shapiro concluded that
(1) “Heidegger changed his interpretation of Van Gogh's
painting” and (2) “ended up admitting that he was uncertain
about whose shoes they were.” Meyer's former
conclusion is exaggerated (Heidegger retracts nothing essential from
his phenomenological interpretation of Van Gogh, as we will see in
section 4), and his second misses the point of Heidegger's note,
which is that no one (neither he nor Shapiro) can be certain
about who originally broke in the shoes which Van Gogh painted.
See Shapiro 1968(p. 142 note 9) and Shapiro 1994. The quotations
above are taken from Craven 1997, p. 161. On Shapiro, see also
Craven 1994.

55. Heidegger
is
the only one who thinks that the key to the enduring appeal Van
Gogh's famous painting of “A Pair of Shoes” can be
found in the poignant way in which the painting paradoxically depicts
an absence making itself present. Cliff Edwards, who spent
“many hours in Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum with this
painting,” suggests that “Vincent, in these empty shoes,
painted absence,” although, as we will see, Edwards means
something different than Heidegger does by this (Edwards 2004, pp. 52,
54).

56. As
noted
earlier, Klee became extremely important for the later Heidegger, who
would spend many “hours [alone] with Klee's
paintings.” But when Heidegger's art-historian friend
Petzet helped make a television program about Klee, Heidegger watched
it and then vociferously objected to the way that the “random
movement of the camera forces the eye to take certain leaps that hinder
an intensive, quiet viewing as well as a thoughtful staying-with (or a
“lingering thinking-after,” verweilendes
Nachdenken), which each single work and the relations within it
deserve.” Petzet was so convinced by Heidegger's
criticism that this technologically-mediated viewing necessarily
“missed the tenderness and intimacy that flourish between
Klee's lines” that he resolved never again to make a
television program about art (Petzet 1993, pp. 146, 150).

57. Even
Shapiro
eventually found it important to draw our attention to “[t]he
thickness and heaviness of the impasto pigment substance, the
emergence of the dark shoes from the shadow into the light,
the irregular, angular patterns and surprisingly loosened laces
extended beyond the silhouettes of the shoes” (1994, p. 146,
emphasis added), all without ever realizing how close he was coming to
Heidegger's phenomenological interpretation of Van Gogh's
painting.

58. Some
art
historians are so convinced that such subliminal figures were
intentional on Van Gogh's part that their presence has been used
not only to interpret his mental health but even to try to authenticate
his disputed works. Personal experience suggests that some people
can see these figures quite easily, while others apparently
cannot. The scientific “skeptic,” Michael Shermer
(2008), plausibly suggests that the tendency to make sense out of
non-sense evolved in human beings because missing a real pattern
potentially has much higher evolutionary costs than noticing a false
one; e.g., to mistake the wind in the grass for a lion is much more
dangerous than the reverse. Of course, making sense of what
initially seems senseless also surely has immense evolutionary benefits
(giving rise to science itself, e.g.!), and the art
historians are surely right to suppose that at least some of the “patterns” in Van
Gogh's backgrounds are not in fact meaningless data (upon which one
merely projects one's own subjective associations, as in a
Rorschach test). Still, Shermer's hypothesis opens the door
to the phenomenologically problematic possibility that only those who
have inherited an evolutionarily non-universal tendency toward a kind
of hyperactive pattern-recognition might be able to appreciate
Heidegger's point. If so, one interesting further question
would be whether such a trait is more prevalent in artists, poets,
sculptors, etc.? That might support Heidegger's
understanding of the essence of artistic creation, but it might also
limit the force of his call for us to learn to practice
“dwelling”—as a poetic sensitivity and openness to
other possible meanings—if such an openness is largely
hard-wired. The crucial question here, then, would be whether
such an openness can be learned, or at least improved upon. And
absent some specific empirical study of the matter, it is not clear how
optimistic one is entitled to be here. As Vincent wrote to his
brother Theo on 9 August 1882 (a famous correspondence which Heidegger
read enthusiastically—in 1919 Heidegger mentions Van Gogh and
Martin Luther as his two exemplars of authenticity): “They
[our parents] will never [emphasis added] be able to
understand what painting is. They cannot understand that the
figure of a laborer—some furrows in a ploughed field, a bit of
sand, sea and sky—are serious subjects, so difficult, but at the
same time so beautiful, that it is indeed worthwhile to devote one's
life to expressing the poetry hidden in them.” (Van Gogh
1991, letter #226.)

59. In
a birthday
note to the to the poet René Char in 1971, Heidegger wrote of
Cézanne that: “In the late work of the painter, the
tension of emerging and not emerging has become onefold, transformed
into a mysterious identity. Is there shown here a pathway that
opens onto a belonging-together of poet and thinker?”
(Quoted in Petzet 1993, pp. 143-4.) See below and Young's
unsurpassed treatment of Heidegger's later work on art (in Young
2001). The understanding of art Young discovers in the later
Heidegger can already be found in his more famous middle works,
however, if one focuses on his interpretation of Van Gogh's
painting and not only on his better known understanding of the Greek
temple.

60. A
black and
white reproduction of Klee's “Saint from a Window”
can be found in Young 2001, p. 160.

61. Heidegger's
unpublished notes on Klee are
partly reproduced by Seubold 1993; quotations taken from pp. 8,
11. In his later works, Klee began to erase the lines that
typically distinguish a painting's foreground image from its
background, and he populated this background with numerous other
figures that enter into a viewer's awareness to greater and
lesser degrees. Thus Klee's late works, Heidegger suggests,
paint the usually inconspicuous tension of emerging and withdrawing,
the usually unnoticed opposition of foreground and background which
allows painting to work. The “cost” of Klee's
“semi-abstraction” (Young 2001, p. 163) seems to be that
Klee's paintings sacrifice the longstanding tradition of a clear
and unambiguous central image. Of course, Klee is far from alone
in bearing this “cost,” but his semi-abstraction did help
open the door for the abstract and conceptual art movements that
followed, the merits of which Heidegger remained more skeptical about,
as his acquaintance with them was minimal (as Young 2001 shows).
If, in the terms of the early Heidegger, Van Gogh helps lead us back
from the presence of an on-hand object to the encounter with hands-on
equipmentality, Klee seems to leave us half-submerged within such
equipmentality. Or, to put this in a later Heideggerian light,
one could say (with Young) that “whereas, like Cézanne,
Klee thematizes the presencing of world, unlike Cézanne, the
works [of Klee] explicitly present us with the presencing of other
worlds as well.” (Young 2001, p. 162.) What Young
says here of Cézanne can also be said of Van Gogh. Indeed,
Van Gogh seems to be somewhere between Cézanne and Klee, in that
Heidegger sees at least one other world slumbering in “A Pair of
Shoes,” viz., the world of the farmer (to which we return
below). In the terms the later Heidegger still uses, he says that
Klee depicts “no object” but, instead, “the nothing
coming to presence [Nichts Anwesendes]” (Seubold 1993,
p. 11), which is precisely the insight that Heidegger finds in Van Gogh
in the mid 1930s. For Heidegger, Van Gogh, Cézanne, and
Klee also stand in close proximity to “East Asian
‘Art’”—specifically, to “Zen”
painting (see e.g. this famous
“Enso,” or circle, by the Zen master Hakuin)—which,
as Heidegger
points out, “is in itself not concerned with a
‘representation’ of what is, but rather with the approach
of humanity to the enveloping nothingness” (ibid.).

62. For
Heidegger, this audience is a group of “preservers” in
whose lives the meaning of the work becomes profoundly important.
These preservers are thus a group which the work first constitutes but
also a group without which the work cannot accomplish any work at
all.

63. Heidegger
already anticipates his 1935 thinking of the essential conflict of
earth and world in 1929, when he adds: “The nothing does
not merely serve as the counterpart of beings; rather, it originally
belongs to their essential unfolding [a later note specifies:
“the essential unfolding of being”] as such.”
(P 91/GA9 115)

64. This
is true
only for as long as the artwork “lives.” For
Heidegger all artwork has a finite lifespan, since the preservation of
the world of meaning it opens depends not only on its materiality but
also on “preservers” who struggle to keep its world
open. For a clear phenomenological development of
Heidegger's view, see Wrathall 2006, pp. 71-87.

65. Although
Heidegger toned down his rhetorical presentation of such
“conflicts” in his later work, this Heraclitean tension of
unified opposites is maintained even in his much less overtly agonistic
thinking of the (now dual) oppositions that join the reconceived
“earth” to “the heavens” and the
“mortals” to “the divinities” (along two
different axes) in his later thinking of “the fourfold” in
essays such as “The Thing” and “Building Dwelling
Thinking” (both in Poetry, Language, Thought).
Nonetheless, the “earth” Heidegger refers to in his later
“fourfold” is quite different from the “earth”
in “The Origin of the Work of Art”; put simply, the earth
loses much of its ineffability, which Heidegger transfers to the
fourfold as a whole.

66. The
“earth” is Heidegger's response to the problem that
this move seems to make all creation ex nihilo, as we will
see.

67. This
helps
explain why Heidegger placed Klee “higher than Picasso”
(Seubold 1993, p. 6). While Klee's semi-abstraction brings
this tension between revealing and concealing itself to the fore (and
so teaches us about the necessarily partial nature of perception and
our experience of intelligibility more generally), Picasso's
cubism seems to follow the Modern subjectivistic impulse by seeking to
represent all the hidden aspects of a figure simultaneously.

68. As
Heidegger
puts it: “What happens here? What is at work in the
work? Van Gogh's painting is the revelation
[Eröffnung] of what equipment, the pair of farmer shoes,
is in truth. This entity steps out here into the
unconcealment of its being. This unconcealment is what the Greeks
called alêtheia.” (PLT 36/GA5 21) In
the 1956 “Addendum” to “The Origin of the Work of
Art,” Heidegger refers to this dynamic union of “clearing
and concealing” whereby being becomes intelligible in
time as “the movement of the clearing of self-concealment as
such” (PLT 84/GA5 71-2).

69. Given
the way
Heidegger moves from a particular ontic work of art to the ontological
truth of art in general, it might not be a coincidence that he seems to
generalize from his description of the nothing that emerges from Van
Gogh's particular (“ontic”) painting of “A Pair
of Shoes” when he makes the following, ontological claim about
the structure of intelligibility: “And yet—beyond
what is, not apart from but, rather, before it, there is still
something else that happens. In the midst of all that is an open
place comes to presence. There is a clearing. Thought from
the perspective of entities, this clearing has more being than entities
do. This open center is therefore not surrounded by what is;
rather, the clearing center itself encircles all that is, like the
nothing which we scarcely know.” (PLT 53/GA5 39-40)

70. This
holds
true, moreover, whether these worlds are more monolithic historical
epochs implicitly held together by great works of art like the Greek
temple, or initially much smaller and (insofar as Heidegger's
ambition takes root in his successors) ultimately more pluralistic
historical worlds like the one brought together around Van Gogh's
painting by Heidegger's attempt to “preserve” its
phenomenological truth.

71. Here
Heidegger's views have obviously been deeply influenced by
Nietzsche's early view that a fundamental conflict between
Dionysian and the Apollonian forces is the engine driving the unfolding
of history—an opposition Heidegger traces back to
Hölderlin's positing of a basic distinction between Greek
“fire” and German “clarity,” as Young (2001,
pp. 40-1) shows. (But Young exaggerates when he suggests that
Hölderlin's view is “identical” with
Heidegger's thinking of the earth/world duality.)

72. This,
however, is the point of Heidegger's understanding of
the ancient Greek temple. What confuses matters here is that
Heidegger seems to have gotten stuck in a rhetorical habit by the time
he introduces the Greek temple and Tragedy, and thus misleadingly
suggests that: “A building, a Greek temple, displays
nothing.” (PLT 41/GA5 27) And: “In the tragedy
nothing is staged or displayed theatrically…” (PLT 43/GA5
29). In the former case at least, Heidegger's point really
is the more straightforward one that the Greek temple is not a
representation of anything (since there was not anything preceding the
temple that it sought to re-present). The temple is thus quite
different from Van Gogh's painting of the shoes, which for
Heidegger really represents the nothing.

73. Although
Magritte's painting initially appears “as simple as a page
borrowed from a botanical manual,” as Foucault suggests (1983, p.
19), the mysteries of the painting are quickly multiplied by the vague
pronoun reference in “This is not a pipe”:
“This” could refer to the image of the pipe, the words
beneath it, or the entire ensemble.

74. It
is true
that for Heidegger Van Gogh's painting is not wholly
representational—and should not, in the end, be understood
representationally—but this is because it really represents the
nothing, and does so in a way that exceeds and so transcends aesthetic
representation from within. “The picture which shows the
farmer's shoes…[does] not only [emphasis added]
make manifest what these isolated entities are as isolated
entities… [Rather, the picture allows] unconcealment as such to
happen in relation to the totality of what is” (PLT 56/GA5
43). Heidegger's “if they manifest entities at
all” has been deliberately excised from this quotation because
the doubt it expresses stems from the fact that in this quotation he is
also discussing Meyer's poem “Fountain” (the second
elision), which might not in fact represent an actual fountain the way
Van Gogh's painting of “A Pair of Shoes” does
represent an actual pair of shoes (among the other things that it
does). Heidegger's doubt thus suggests that he thinks
Meyer's poem is more like the completely non-representational
Greek temple than the initially representational painting.

75. Here
we see
the deeper point behind Heidegger's aforementioned
phenomenological dictum: “What seems natural to us is
presumably just the familiarity of a long-established custom which has
forgotten the unfamiliarity from which it arose.” (PLT 24/GA5
9) See also the emphasis Rorty (1991) places on this important
affinity between Nietzsche and Heidegger.

76. Another
way
to experience this “essential strife” of earth and world in
Van Gogh's painting might be to notice how the painting's
subtly rich and dynamic background not only supports but also envelops
the foreground image of the shoes. The shoes in the foreground
belong so integrally to their background that they can even appear to
recede back into it. Notice, for example, how both shoes (but
especially the left one) seem almost to melt back into their own black
shadows, and the way the lightest colors “behind” the shoes
bleed over across the edges of these shoes in Van Gogh's thick
brushwork (especially between the two shoes and along the right edge of
the right shoe). In such ways, as Heidegger suggests, “the
earth…tends to draw the world into itself and keep it
there” (PLT 49/GA5 35).

77. In
Being
and Time (1927), the claim that existence always-already
“stands-out” into temporally-structured intelligibility is
presented as a phenomenological description of how we ordinarily
encounter ourselves when we are not paying attention to the
encounter. In “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936),
however, such “existence” no longer simply describes the
way we always-already are; it now becomes an existential task to
become Dasein by realizing what we already are
implicitly. Heidegger thus writes that the goal of “The
Origin of the Work of Art”—“the step toward which
everything that has been said up to now leads” (PLT 66/GA5
54)—is to help us learn from art to become what we are: To
“resolutely” own up to what human existence most truly is,
Heidegger writes, means entering into the essential conflict of
“earth and world” and thereby encountering the
“self-transcendence” of existence in “the sober
standing-within the extraordinary awesomeness of the truth that is
happening in the work” (PLT 67-8/GA5 55). “The Origin
of the Work of Art” thus suggests that art is a particularly
direct and revealing actualization of the human essence. For, to
be a human being, in Heidegger's terms, is to realize oneself as
a world-discloser, struggling to world the earth in the right sort of
way (as the next section explains). On this perfectionist issue
of how we learn to become what we are, see Thomson 2004b.

78. Heidegger
does clearly think, however, that the earth allows itself to be brought
into its own, i.e., that there are ways of gestalting the inchoate
forms that the earth offers us that best respect what was there, e.g.,
when Michelangelo gestalts David from that piece of marble, or when
Heidegger's gestalts (what we will call) “the old woman
who lived in the shoe” in Van Gogh's particular painting
(see section 4 below), or even, perhaps, when we gestalt the nothing in
Heidegger's own essay. Indeed, such a creative “truth
event”—in which entities and human beings come “into
their own” simultaneously (for it is not only the marble but also
Michelangelo himself who is realized in this act of sculptural
world-disclosure)—is what Heidegger means by Ereignis,
hence the aptness of the otherwise strange translation of this later
term of art as “enowning” rather than simply
“event.” (From this perspective, we can also see that
the older “event of appropriation” risks suggesting
something more subjectivistic than Heidegger intends.)

79. It
is perhaps
not a coincidence that Heidegger's thinking of the mysterious and
yet familiar “rift structure” that joins earth and world
should emerge out of his phenomenological meditation on Van
Gogh's painting of a pair of shoes; shoes are precisely the place
where our worlds ordinarily make contact with the earth.

80. Heidegger
thus makes the case that creation can be grounded no longer in
geographical but in ontological indigeny in his “Memorial
Address” (in DT).

81. Or,
to take
another example, think of the way our institutions of higher education
increasingly seek to make students into whatever society currently
values most, rather than helping them identify, cultivate, and develop
their intrinsic skills and capacities and yoke these to serving their
generation's emerging needs. (Heidegger's arguments
to this effect are developed in Thomson 2005, Ch. 4.)

82. Heidegger
does not rule out a poetic receptiveness within technological settings
but, rather, suggests that such settings do undermine receptivity, and
that recognizing how they do so helps us to find meaning within them
nevertheless. For a revealing analysis of how such meaning can be
discovered within technological settings (as well as how they work
against it), see Crawford 2009.

83. What
the
later Heidegger thus suggests is a fundamental ontologicalpluralism. We need to be sensitive enough to intrinsic
meanings to be able to cut reality at the joints, as it were, but, in
each case, there will be more than one way of cutting reality at these
joints (or of gestalting Heidegger's
“rift-structure”). This means, for example, that,
just as a talented artisan can make more than one thing from a single
piece of wood, so there was also more than one form slumbering in the
marble from which Michelangelo freed David, and more than one
meaningful career open to a talented student. Like the
neo-Aristotelian view of “open resoluteness”
(Ent-schlossenheit) Heidegger developed in Being and
Time, his later view of active receptivity (Gelassenheit)
suggests a kind of ethical and aesthetic phronêsis or
practical wisdom. The point (Thomson 2004 argues) is that, rather
than getting hung up looking for the one right answer—and, when
we finally despair of finding that right answer, rebounding back to the
relativistic view that no answer is better than any other (or
concluding nihilistically that intrinsic meanings are an obsolete
myth)—we should instead cultivate the recognition that in most
situations there will be more than one right answer to questions of
what to do or how to go on. The hermeneutic principle to
follow—in ethics as well as aesthetics—is that there is
more than one intrinsic meaning to be found. For, if being is
inexhaustible, capable of yielding meaning again and again, then the
intrinsic meanings of things must be plural (however paradoxical that
initially seems, given our obsession with formal systems capable of
monosemic exactness).

84. In
Heidegger's terms of art, this means understanding the
“being of entities” in terms of “being as such”
(Thomson 2005, p. 164).

85. Hence,
the
humble but difficult “task” (Aufgabe) Heidegger
thus sets for himself and for us in “The Origin of the Work of
Art,” as he rather mysteriously suggests, is simply “to see
the riddle…that art itself is,” not “to solve the
riddle” (PLT 79/GA5 67).

86. See
EHP, pp.
51-65; “The Origin of the Work of Art” builds on the same
view: “Language, by naming beings for the first time, first
brings beings to word and to appearance.” (PLT 73/GA5
61)

87. Shapiro
misses this point; his Marxian presuppositions lead him to assume that
“Heidegger's argument throughout refers to the shoes of a
class of persons” (Shapiro 1994, p. 150, emphasis
added).

88. See
Shapiro,
“A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in Theory and
Philosophy of Art, p. 136.

90. Shapiro
(1968) explains this background and gives the date of his letter to
Heidegger.

91. As
Babich
(2003, p. 155) reports, Shapiro's objection was widely understood
by art historians as having “conclusively discredited
Heidegger's essay… by discounting its objective legitimacy
or accuracy.” The strange fact that philosophers and art
historians typically reach very different judgments about the
significance of Heidegger's alleged attribution error has itself
become the impetus for an interesting philosophical reflection (see
Kelly 2003, pp. 20-54).

93. Derrida
recognizes this political subtext and suggests that Shapiro's
reduction of earth to soil misses precisely what remained most
unorthodox and challenging about Heidegger's Nazism, viz., his
philosophical attempt to replace the Nazi's identity-defining
philosopheme of the blood-drenched “soil” with his own
conception of the ineffable, non-totalizable, but nonetheless existence
supporting “earth.” (See Derrida 1987, pp. 272-3, and
the more detailed discussion in Thomson 2005, p. 135 note
103.)

94. One
problem
with such hermeneutic denegation detection is that it becomes very
difficult to circumscribe its legitimate application: To someone
like Derrida, every “clearly,” “obviously,”
“of course,” “to be sure,” etc., begins to look
like an author's unconscious confession of a repressed
uncertainty (except, apparently, when it is Derrida himself who is
employing such emphatic expressions of certainty). The specific
problem here, moreover, is that Shapiro overlooks the fact that
philosophers like Heidegger are trained to anticipate and respond to
critics' likely objections. (Such training, which comes
from studying the history of philosophy, gets powerfully reinforced if
one becomes well-known enough for one's own work to become the
frequent subject of the criticisms of others, as happened to Heidegger
with the publication of Being and Time in 1927.) In the
sentence in question, Heidegger shows that he recognizes that he is
saying something that will sound idiosyncratic to readers, and how
could he not? The sympathetic way to respond to his denial of
projection, then, is to look for an alternative explanation for his
description of the farming woman—a figure which, his next
sentence goes on to say, he literally saw in his encounter
with Van Gogh's painting. That is what we are doing
here.

95. Shapiro's
own Marxian-Freudian
interpretation of Van Gogh's painting—which holds that for
“an artist to isolate his worn shoes as the subject of a picture
is for him to convey a concern with the fatalities of his social
being” (Shapiro 1968, p. 140)—seems equally open to the
charge of subjective projection. And Shapiro's further
development of this way of interpreting Van Gogh's
painting—which unblinkingly suggests that the shoes are
“morbid,” “deviant,” deformed,”
“unsightly,” “depressed and broken” (Shapiro
1994, 147)—does little to diminish such an impression.

96. It
is perhaps
unfortunate that the amazing subtleties of Van Gogh's use of
color and brush-stroke are barely intimated by even
the highest-contrast reproductions of the famous work;
Van Gogh's paintings simply must be seen in person in order to be
fully appreciated. Heidegger would probably celebrate this fact,
however, as another sense in which Van Gogh's painting resists
both representation and the efficient ordering of late-modern
enframing.

97. Kockelmans
(1987, p. 128) makes essentially the same mistake as Shapiro when he
confidently asserts of Heidegger's description that “it is
obvious that all of this cannot be seen in the picture”
and so concludes that Heidegger is not “describing” Van
Gogh's painting at all. As we shall see,
Heidegger is indeed describing his experience of Van
Gogh's painting (an experience grounded phenomenologically in his
discernment of the figure of "the little old woman" emerging from the shoe on the right).

98. It
is, e.g.,
clearly what Heidegger seeks to do when he describes the farming woman
Van Gogh painted (as well as what we seek to do here by describing the
nothing Heidegger himself evokes). We can say that this figure is
not obvious because no one has ever mentioned it before. Even if
it seems obvious in retrospect (as masterful artistic gestalts often
do), we can nevertheless imagine gestalting those bits of color and
paint otherwise (at least subtly so). This, then, is quite
different from a “hidden eye picture” or even from the
subliminal images Mark Tansey cleverly conceals in the background of
his work, which can be hard to see but, once seen, cannot be seen in
any other way; e.g., see his “West Face,” 2004). In
effect, Heidegger is offering us his own creative gestalt, his own way
of “worlding” this bit of earth, in order to exemplify the
very view he is seeking to convey.

99. As
Heidegger laconically puts this rather complex point:
“Truth happens in Van Gogh's painting. That does not
mean that something on-hand is correctly portrayed but, rather, that
the totality of what-is, world and earth in their counter-play, attains
unconcealment in the becoming manifest of the equipmental being of the
shoe-equipment” (PLT 56/GA5 43).

100. Derrida
and Babich both seek to unsettle the controversy by, in effect,
developing Heidegger's suggestion that we cannot tell with
certainty “to whom [the shoes] belong” (GA5 18 note
a). Derrida (1987, pp. 257-382) dedicates more than one hundred
pages to multiplying a seemingly unending succession of skeptical
questions which seem meant to suggest that the identity of the shoes is
radically undecideable (since we cannot even be sure to which painting
Heidegger referred, or whether the shoes in question form a pair, and
so on). Babich argues that, even if we grant to Shapiro that Van
Gogh owned the shoes in the painting, this does not mean they were Van
Gogh's shoes in the appropriate sense. On the basis of the
same historiographical evidence Shapiro appeals to (Van Gogh's
letter to his brother, Gauguin's account of Van Gogh's
studio, etc.), Babich shows that Van Gogh bought the pair of shoes in
question not in order to wear them himself but rather, “like the
rough beer steins Van Gogh also collected, …in order to paint
them” (Babich 2003, pp. 157-8), thus leaving open the question of
who originally broke them in. Yet, this line of reasoning is open
to the game-changing response that, as Kelly (2003, p. 51) starkly puts
it, “The Painting is van Gogh's, according to Shapiro,
because he [Van Gogh] invested himself in it, because his subjectivity
is embodied (not merely represented) in it.
This idea—that embodied subjectivity is constitutive of what
modern art is—is what Shapiro affirms and Heidegger
denies.” Although Kelly subtly changes the terms of the debate
here, he nicely brings us to the crux of the issue: For Shapiro
(on Kelly's reconstruction), Van Gogh's very act of
painting the shoes transformed them into an expression of his own
subjectivity, whereas, for Heidegger, Van Gogh's painting shows
us a way beyond the subject/object metaphysics that Shapiro clearly
presupposes. Still, the most basic problem for all those who
would defend Heidegger by arguing that the shoes originally did (or
could have) belonged to a farmer is that this line of defense overlooks
Shapiro's most telling objection. (This is quite understandable,
because the objection does not come through at all clearly in
Shapiro's work. The understanding of it presented here would not have been achieved without personal
conversations with the art historian David Craven, who interviewed
Shapiro several times, see Craven 1997.) Shapiro's
seemingly incontrovertible objection is that the shoes Van Gogh painted
could not have been used by a farmer while farming because the Dutch
farmers Van Gogh painted wore wooden clogs in the field, not leather
shoes, which would have quickly rotted from the damp conditions in the
fields (at least before the later advent of rubber souls). J.
Kockelmans (1985, pp. 126-32) implicitly acknowledges the force of this
criticism by attempting to dodge it, claiming that Heidegger is not in
fact describing Van Gogh's painting but only using it as a
phenomenological jumping off point to evoke the entirely different
shoes of the farmers with which he was familiar. This reading not
only misses Heidegger's use of the “nothing” but,
more seriously, fails to understand the way Heidegger's
phenomenology seeks to build a direct bridge from the ontic to the
ontological (a bridge that cannot be built by the kind of
free-associations Kockelmans attributes to him). Kockelmans seems
to presuppose here that the ontic and ontological are heterogeneous
domains (again understandably, as this was a central tenet of the
orthodox Heideggerian scholars of the last generation and continues to
be proclaimed by influential critics such as Habermas), but such a
mistaken view would place Heideggerian phenomenology beyond the realm
of any meaningful kind of communal adjudication.